different aspect. No garretteers, these novelists and journalists
awaiting their promotion. They eat--and entertain their critics--at
fashionable restaurants, they are seen in expensive seats at the
theatre; they inhabit handsome flats--photographed for an illustrated
paper on the first excuse. At the worst, they belong to a reputable
club, and have garments which permit them to attend a garden party or
an evening "at home" without attracting unpleasant notice. Many
biographical sketches have I read during the last decade, making
personal introduction of young Mr. This or young Miss That, whose book
was--as the sweet language of the day will have it--"booming"; but
never one in which there was a hint of stern struggles, of the pinched
stomach and frozen fingers.'

[Footnote 3: Three vols., 1884, dedicated to M.C.R. In one volume
'revised,' 1895 (preface dated October 1895).]

[Footnote 4: Who but Gissing could describe a heroine as exhibiting in her
countenance 'habitual nourishment on good and plenteous food'?]

In his later years it was customary for him to inquire of a new author 'Has
he starved'? He need have been under no apprehension. There is still a
God's plenty of attics in Grub Street, tenanted by genuine artists,
idealists and poets, amply sufficient to justify the lamentable conclusion
of old Anthony à Wood in his life of George Peele. 'For so it is and always
hath been, that most poets die poor, and consequently obscurely, and a hard
matter it is to trace them to their graves.' Amid all these miseries,
Gissing upheld his ideal. During 1886-7 he began really to _write_ and the
first great advance is shown in _Isabel Clarendon_.[5] No book, perhaps,
that he ever wrote is so rich as this in autobiographical indices. In the
melancholy Kingcote we get more than a passing phase or a momentary glimpse